In a machine type communications (Machine Type Communications, referred to as MTC in short) application having a large number of user equipments (User Equipment, referred to as UE), a plurality of user equipments (equipment in the MTC application) may form a whole, which is referred to as a group or a user equipment group (Group), so that a network operator or a user in the industry may manage or control the group as a whole. The user equipments may form the group in different networking manner, for example, an independent access networking manner and a master/slave networking manner. In the independent access networking manner, each user equipment in the group separately accesses a network, and the network can associate all the user equipments in the group together (that is, form a group) for management and control. In the master/slave networking manner, the plurality of user equipments access the network through an access device, where the access device may be one of the user equipments, and may also be an MTC gateway (MTC GateWay, referred to as MTC GW). If the access device is one of the user equipments, the one of the user equipments is master equipment (Master UE), and other user equipments are slave equipment (Slave UE); if the access device is the MTC GW, the MTC GW is master equipment, and all the user equipments are slave equipment. The network may associate the master equipment and the slave equipment together (that is, form a group) for management and control. In the network, a bandwidth control device (a gateway or an access network element) may perform maximum bandwidth control according to an obtained aggregate maximum bit rate (Aggregate Maximum Bit Rate) of a user equipment.
During the process of implementing the present invention, the inventor finds that the prior art at least has the following problems: an existing bandwidth control device respectively obtains an aggregate maximum bit rate of each user equipment from a subscription database through a mobile management network element, and respectively performs maximum bandwidth control for each user equipment, thus increasing burdens of the bandwidth control device and the mobile management network element.